Being a good listener has always mattered to me. I try to be someone who is empathetic, listens to friends vent, and gives advice when appropriate. In a healthy friendship, each person is mutually respected and gets equal time to talk and be heard. Truly good friends actively listen and respond empathetically. Yes, usually someone interjects to go on a tangent, but in the end both people feel heard and appreciated.

These standards dissolve if one person commands more attention in the relationship, forcing their friends to listen and push aside their own problems. Some people tend to soak up more of their friends’ energy by constantly venting about problems without listening in return. In this type of relationship, the supportive person becomes the “therapist” friend: the one who listens and gives advice but rarely gets to share their own issues. While this can become the norm in some relationships, it’s not actually healthy.

Here’s an example: Jenny complains about her roommate to Sarah every day, and Sarah gives her advice for an hour. Sarah starts to tell a story about her own problems, but Jenny relates the conversation back to herself. Sarah is once again left giving advice instead of receiving help. This dynamic becomes cyclical, leaving Sarah feeling emotionally drained and undervalued in the friendship.

It’s not selfish to want to be treated with equal respect. When someone feels ignored or overlooked, it creates an unbalanced dynamic in which one person gives all their attention and energy to the other, yet receives nothing. Being the “therapist” in a friendship can be fun for a bit, but it gets old fast. After too many discussions about the same topic, the conversation stops feeling productive and gets boring for the friend who has to constantly sympathize. That’s why I call this the “unpaid therapist” role, because a therapist never gets to share their problems with the patient.

There are real reasons this dynamic of one-sided conversations is unsustainable beyond just being annoying and rude, one being that resentment builds.

“When people are feeling that they are giving, giving, giving, and not getting back, it builds resentment,” says Emerson professor and negotiation and conflict communication professional Israela Brill-Cass. She explains that if someone feels unsupported and doesn’t tell their friend how they feel, the relationship is strained further. “What ends up happening is you have no idea that you’re overutilizing my ear, but I’m going to hold it against you anyway. One of two things happens: I’m either going to start avoiding you, because I don’t want to deal with that messy conversation, or I’m going to go complain to our group of friends to get sympathy for it. All of that behavior wrecks relationships.”

Recently, I brought up this struggle to a friend—one who doesn’t make me her therapist—and when I finished talking, she looked uncomfortable. “I’m not going to talk about my problems anymore,” she said. But that wasn’t the reaction I wanted. We always keep a balance in our conversations, so I wasn’t trying to shame her for telling me about her issues. Though I explained that I enjoyed listening to her vent and that this didn’t apply to our friendship, she wasn’t convinced. I felt bad for bringing up the topic in the first place.

I didn’t know how to effectively discuss this without invalidating my friends and their issues, but being honest is the first step. Brill-Cass thinks it’s important to be transparent when having a conversation to fix the tension. “I’m a huge fan of transparency as a default,” she says, “and being able to look at someone and say, ‘I care about our friendship a lot, but I’m feeling it’s not balanced. It might just be the circumstances that are going on in my life right now, but I feel like I’m there for you a lot, and then when I try to share with you, you don’t seem to have the time for me. I’d like to figure out a way that we can rebalance it so we both feel good.”

Using this dialogue addresses the conflict without causing extra tension. Although saying, “I’m more supportive of you than you are of me” can sound like an accusation, if both friends care about the relationship, they will be receptive and work on fixing their issues. And if one friend can’t be there for the other, it’s valid to say, “I’m not in a place to be that person for you.” It’s okay to walk away from a friendship and quit your unpaid therapist position. In the end, we all deserve to feel heard and appreciated — and we shouldn’t settle for anything less.

Quit Your Unpaid Therapist Position